Probably one of the coolest things you learn (if you haven’t already) after picking up jQuery is realizing how easy it is to add zebra striping to your tables (alternating row color shading) as demonstrated in the following picture.

Before I knew jQuery I used to write code the like the following in order to get the zebra striping appearance for my tables… which stinks to high heaven!

That was easy :) The jQuery line selects all the even rows from the table with the “styled” class attribute and adds the “alt” to all the class attributes which provides the alternating row shading.

Another common usability feature that users tend to like is row hover highlighting. Well, this turns out to be another easy thing to do with jQuery. The following code selects all the rows in the table with the “styled” class and attaches a mouseover and mouseout event to all of them. When those events get fired jQuery will either add or remove the “over” CSS definition to/from the class attribute.

Monday, June 29, 2009

As I mentioned in my previous post, I am starting a series of detailed blog entries that focus on each topic from a recent CodeStock presentation I gave entitled, “Useful jQuery tips, tricks, and plugins with ASP.NET MVC”

I’ve done several talks about jQuery over the last several months and a common question I get is how to get jQuery Intellisense into Visual Studio.

The steps to include Intellisense are actually quite straight forward and are actually easier than they were several months ago.

Note: The vsdoc.js is also included when you do a New->Project... ASP.NET MVC Web Application

Include jQuery into your MasterPage

If all goes well, then you should be able to see jQuery Intellisense like this…

If the steps don’t give you the above results, then you might try checking out some frequently asked questions hosted on Jeff King’s (a program manager at Microsoft) website. He has a great list of gotchas that might help you getting past your particular situation.

Also, you can check out Scott Gu’s or Rick Strahl’s posts for further details of the above instructions.

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Session One: Software Patterns by Brian Price Patterns are an important tool to use as architects and developers. They provide a common vocabulary for us to design with, as well as a common approach to a common problem. Come learn about useful patterns, and how to use them in your everyday code.

Session Two: How I Learned To Love Dependency Injection by James Bender Dependency Injection is one of those scary topics that most developers avoid. It sounds all ‘high-falootin’ and complex. It’s not. Really. We wouldn’t lie. It’s a great way to manage complexity in your system, and a great way to make your system so much more testable. And isn’t that what we all want?